Portal 2 review

Valve’s first Portal game was a hidden gem that defied all our expectations. A first-person puzzler with a darkly comic plot, we were immersed in a maze of test chambers where we played lab rat for psychopathic mainframe GlaDOS, which runs the Aperture Science corporation testing facility. It was short but sweet, and in the end we won, sort of.

Portal 2 retains the same basic game mechanics as the first game: run, jump, shoot a blue portal on one wall, shoot an orange portal on to another and jump through one to come out of the other. As before, a tight physics engine means you can use long drops and carefully positioned portals to shoot yourself across a room at ever-increasing speeds. However, the budget’s gone up, the game’s much longer and you’ll get plenty of intriguing new puzzle elements, as well as an insight into the history of the Aperture Science corporation.

You, in the form of Portal’s mute and long-suffering protagonist Chell, wake up in a hotel room. The building you’re in is about to collapse, but you’re guided to safety by Wheatley, a robotic personality core distinctively voiced by Stephen Merchant. In the years you’ve spent in stasis, the Aperture Science facility has fallen to ruin: overgrown, decayed and disintegrating. Wandering through the remnants of old test chambers is an oddly poignant experience if you’ve played the first game.

The puzzles are as elegantly constructed as ever, but the route to your escape presents few serious challenges at first. It all seems a bit too easy until you accidentally re-awaken GlaDOS, put Wheatley in control of the facility and watch in horror as he’s driven mad by the injection of power. In your attempt to escape the insane personality core, you’ll explore the bowels of the facility and discover the experimental projects that Aperture tried to bury, including anti-gravity funnels and coloured goo with a variety of intriguing physical properties. You’ll even discover the origins of GlaDOS herself.

The game as a whole doesn’t involve many puzzles that will stop you in your tracks for long, but when the hard ones finally show up towards the end, they really are tough. We have particularly unkind memories of a multi-stage puzzle that required us to use portals and anti-gravity funnels to knock out sentry bots by dropping blue goo on them before using the same goo to bounce yourself to safety. If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is.

Despite rarely holding us up for long, single-player mode provided hours of gameplay. In a couple of places, the plot feels like it’s been stretched out over more levels than are needed to comfortably explain it, but that’s a minor niggle. Even when you’re done with that, the game’s not over. As well as tons of hidden areas, Portal 2 has what is easily one of the most entertaining co-op modes we’ve played, requiring genuine ingenuity and teamwork as you and a friend take on two-player puzzles as test droids P-body and Atlas. Between that and a recently released toolset that lets you build your own levels, we expect to keep coming back until Portal 3 comes out.